Prompted by Vitaliy Goncharuk's essay in War on the Rocks — read his full argument there.
Everyone is building drone companies. The battlefield may have already moved past them.
A recent War on the Rocks piece by Vitaliy Goncharuk makes an argument worth taking seriously: the next air war won't be won by drones. It will be won by cheap missiles. The data coming out of Ukraine is uncomfortable for the drone-maximalist narrative, and it is worth sitting with before the next funding cycle locks in.
Russia is already strapping turbojet engines onto Shahed-class airframes — turning twenty-to-fifty-thousand-dollar propeller platforms into 460-mph threats that cruise at 29,000 feet. Ukrainian interceptor drones top out around 280 mph and 6,500 feet. The physics do not work. You cannot chase something from behind that flies at twice your speed and four times your altitude. This is not a tuning problem an extra engineering sprint solves. It is an architectural ceiling.
That is the heart of Goncharuk's case: propeller-driven interceptors face structural constraints that engineering cannot overcome. The cost-exchange math that made drones revolutionary five years ago is already migrating to a different platform — cheap, autonomous, mass-producible interceptors at ten-to-fifty thousand dollars per unit. Not half-million-dollar precision missiles. Not drones that cannot catch what they are built to kill. In that world, the drone does not disappear. It gets demoted to logistics — a truck that moves munitions and supplies through permissive airspace, not the weapon at the point of contact.
Hold that against where the money is going. The Department's autonomous warfare push put $54.6 billion toward autonomous systems. JIATF 401 is spending $600 million on counter-UAS at a record pace. The entire procurement reflex is oriented toward the drone threat as it looked last year. But if that threat is already evolving into something drones structurally cannot answer, then a large share of that spend is buying capability against the last war, not the next one.
This is the pattern worth naming. The constraint is not capital — there is more of it aimed at this problem than ever. The constraint is that the demand signal and the procurement signal are pointed at slightly different wars. The battlefield is resetting the cost-exchange ratio again, and the institutions are funding the previous reset.
So the founder question is the one that matters here: what company should exist because this is true? The companies that matter in eighteen months may not be the ones building a better drone. They may be the ones building a cheaper missile — autonomous, AI-guided, mass-producible, with no satellite dependency — the kind of weapon that resets the cost-exchange ratio the way drones did half a decade ago. That is a hard company to build, which is exactly why it is worth building now, while the procurement gravity is still pulling the other direction.
The narrative is that drones change everything. The counter-narrative is already arriving from the field: drones were the first chapter. Cheap autonomous missiles are the next one. The builders who start on the next chapter now — small teams, real authority, short loops between the field and the factory — will be the ones the system is forced to catch up to.
Paul Garcia is the founder of Merge Combinator, a venture studio for national security. He is a retired Air Force officer and Weapons School graduate.